Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

As I've gotten older, I've become less convinced to the value of "advice", but far more convinced to the value of learning by watching what people do.

Unsolicited advice is usually ignored or unappreciated, and published advice has often been through so many layers of thought and editing that it doesn't reflect the true experiences or opinions of the person with the experience. Tell me what you actually did, what happened, and why, not what I "should" do (shout out to Julia Evans as she is a grandmaster at this).

Watching people work and reading their personal recollections is a great way to learn. I've learnt more watching folks doing things like writing code or solving puzzles on livestreams than reading articles by the same people.

Godin says "we don’t have an advice shortage", but we do have a shortage of unembellished recollections, recordings of how people work, work diaries, and other ways to truly see what people do and think rather than what they say we should do or think.

So true. That said, I still think there's value in advice, mainly because it can sometimes help the receiver of the advice view things from a different perspective, look at their situation through a different lens that they might not have done before. That being said, it depends on a) the giver of the advice being able to actually figure out what a beneficial perspective would be, b) the receiver of the advice being open to actually hear it (I for one surely have a tendency to hold on to my own way of thinking, even though I know it's to my own detriment, so I have to make a conscious effort to overcome that), or c) sheer luck. Sometimes you come across a piece of advice, pretty much by random luck, and it just is exactly what you needed to hear. (This too has happened to me.)

> As I've gotten older, I've become less convinced to the value of "advice", but far more convinced to the value of learning by watching what people do.

I've seen this too. In my case it was more being social to people in general. A person with a similar-ish personality. I saw what he was doing, copy/paste for me.

Yes. And in any case, until a person is ready to take and heed advice, the advice given is nearly always wasted on that person.

Usually being "ready" requires life experience and usually that life experience requires failure and pain. The more pain, the more likely they will see the value of advice though some people will paradoxically become less likely to take advice if they are not the type to learn from failure or pain.

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